Magic Time: Angelfire (2 page)

Words have power. Rituals have power.

My mind steadies. I have to get home, to hunker down and wait while there’s still time. I slip into the narrow alley behind me, let it shield me from the noise. Dumpsters radiate hot garbage smell. Funny how, even now, my nose is so easily offended. You’d think, given where I’ve been living lo, these many years, my sense of smell would’ve gone on permanent vacation.

I mentally run over the possible routes back to the underground, discarding Rockefeller Center for Grand Central. This time of day there’ll be less scrutiny, easier to slip into the darkness. Just gotta be careful not to touch the third rail.

There is a rustling behind me, an odd, whispery sound.

Intriguing.

I turn. Wadded candy wrappers, stained sheets of the
Post
, and bits of excelsior that have tumbled out of the Dumpster are starting to swirl about in a minitornado, gathering speed. What’s wrong with this picture is that there’s no wind. None. In spite of this logistical oversight, the trash is still dancing in the air.

Abruptly the force swells, pushing the Dumpsters back and forth on their wheels, their heavy metal lids rising and then banging down again and again, like in a bad horror flick. My skin feels prickly; the smell of ozone charges the air.

Not yet
, I think,
please, not yet.

Doesn’t matter that I’ve been expecting this; I’m terrified. Above me there’s a crackling, snapping noise. And it ain’t Rice Krispies. I look up to see blue electrical discharges whipping about in the sky. Dark clouds roil, casting a yellow-gray pall over Manhattan, over the alley, over me. I feel incredibly small and
watched
—by what, I don’t know and don’t want to know.

The blue lightning is ferocious, slashing in all directions with a sound like ice sheets splintering. And behind it another, greater sound, a low roar that vibrates through me, growing in power and rumbling the ground. I want to run, to hide, but I can’t. I’m not even sure there’s anyplace I
can
hide.

Sudden desire overwhelms me, a compulsion to leave the
shelter of the alley, to
see
what is happening to the city. This is not
my
desire; this comes from outside, but it so invades me that I feel imprisoned, shackled from the inside out.

The pavement beneath my feet heaves and buckles, as if some massive serpent is struggling to burst forth from below. Obeying my captor’s voice, I fight my way back to the alley mouth and peer out.

The sky is alive with blue lightning. It spits its hatred down at the city, frenzied fingers reaching out to every spire. The roar is deafening, a spike through my head. I clap my hands to my ears, but that does nothing. The sound is in my head, too, and now it rises to a scream.

The buildings are melting. Like ice cream cones on a hot day, dripping down—the entire city is liquefying. Proud towers turn to slag as the lightning dances its mad dance and the clouds enfold it like a shroud.

My mouth is open and I think I’m screaming, but I can’t hear it against the shriek of the city. I fold in on myself, covering my eyes, rocking, defenseless. In what I know are my last moments, I surrender to it, realizing that no matter how much I prepare, how much I might
know
, in the end it will do with me whatever it wishes.

I open up to it, and the world falls away.

There’s a jolt, as if the earth is taking one last token stand, and I realize I’m the only one screaming. I clamp my mouth shut, force myself to stop, and cautiously open my eyes.

The buildings are still upright; people still crowd the streets; but the cars, moments ago surging and huffing, are suddenly going nowhere. Sure, I might be looking at normal gridlock, but I know that’s not what this is. The normal sounds of Manhattan have stopped, leaving something as close to silence as this city has known since Peter Stuyvesant stepped off the boat and wowed the locals.

And I, Herman Goldman, saw it coming.

I find my feet, supporting myself against the once again solid brick and mortar of the nearest building. “Your old men will see visions…” I murmur, and wonder if I can still score some antipsychotics at the Roosevelt’s Free Clinic.

W
hat the
T
rees
S
aid

Suleiman-bin-Daoud was wise. He understood what the beasts said, what the birds said, what the fishes said, and what the insects said. He understood what the rocks said deep under the earth when they bowed in towards each other and groaned; and he understood what the trees said when they rustled in the middle of the morning….

“The Butterfly that Stamped,”

from
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling

Apparently, in elite government circles it was known simply as “the Source.” A science project of sorts. Funny, the words “science project” usually bring to mind papier-mâché volcanoes and ant farms, not something that has the power to rip the world apart and put it back together all wrong.

But it appears that the Megillah has that power.

Tina Griffin, all of twelve years old, was one of the things it reassembled. And after it warped her body, clothed her in light, and granted her the power of levitation, it sorted her from among its other various types of “makeovers” and simply took her. And others like her. Where or why, we have no idea. Sort of a perverted take on the Evangelical Christian Rapture.

Before she was wrenched, screaming, out of her brother’s arms in the tiny back bedroom of a run-down house in Boone’s Gap, West Virginia, the changeling Tina spoke of
Something
in the West—a power, an entity, an Enigma. Something that came into the world with a roar and that now grows in it like a malevolent cancer.

And so, a Quest. Or a monumental game of hide and seek. We seek the Enigma and it … well, it doesn’t so much hide as it evades. It’s that thing you’re certain is behind you in the dark. But a swift about-face only nets you empty air and a dark slither out the corner of one eye.

And whispers.

Since that moment in Manhattan when buildings did not melt and sidewalks did not ripple, I’ve heard its whispers. Which makes (lucky) me the only one with half a clue about what part of the West the Megillah inhabits. And that’s about all I have—half a clue. I listen for it; I hear its Voice and we go. Tag, I’m it. Marco Polo. Games. Rough, deadly games.

Since leaving Boone’s Gap our quest has taken us through varied terrain. Quiet pastoral countryside where cows and sheep still graze and watch our passing with little interest. Places where it seemed the earth had erupted in boils, or a giant hand had reached down, dug in, and tried to wrench the bedrock out through the grass and trees and soil.

We avoid cities. Cities are places of unimaginable darkness and violence. I suppose they always were, but it’s a different kind of violence now, at once more focused and more mindless, soul-deep and brutal.

There’s violence of a sort in the country, too. And its effects have been devastating. We’ve seen ghost towns and ghost suburbs and ghost farms. But nothing like what we saw as Manhattan unraveled like a cheap sweater.

We see other folks ever so often. And ever so often we see not-folks. Ex-people who, like Tina, had their DNA radically rearranged. “Tweaks,” Colleen calls them. I prefer “twists”—it’s a gentler word. Although there’s nothing gentle about what the Change has done to them. People tend to avoid them, and they tend to avoid people. Something I understand, completely.

Most often we don’t see them, but merely
feel
them. Since some of them are rather unpleasant, it pays to be vigilant. You develop a sort of ESP about these things. The sense of being watched creeps over your skin and through your brain like a trickle of freezing water. When this happens, Cal’s hand goes to his sword, Colleen’s goes to her machete, Doc’s makes the sign of the cross. Mine does nothing. At the moment, I carry neither weapons nor gods.

We’re traveling on potholed tarmac today as we head for the border between West Virginia and Ohio. Cal and Doc are mounted on fine steeds (Sooner and Koshka, by name), Colleen drives our spiffy home-built wagon, while I ride shotgun. I mean that figuratively, of course. Since the Change, no one I know has yet figured out how to make a shotgun work. This is one of those good news/bad news things.

Our “wagon” is a pickup truck from which the transmission has been removed and the engine compartment gutted back to the firewall. It still has its vinyl-covered seats, but no roof, no windows, no windshield, and sawed-off doors. You can crawl from the front seat right over into the bed. It was, as they say, a find. Only cost us our bicycles and a couple of days work in the bed ’n’ breakfast from hell.

Water barrels are ranked outboard down both sides of the
truck bed, which has an awning that extends from the tailgate all the way out over the remains of the cab. We roll it down in the event of inclement weather. The whole thing looks a lot like those old World War Two troop transports; only it’s a brilliant shade of macintosh yellow. For the first time in many days, the awning is rolled all the way up to the topmost strut of the support framework.

I glance at the sky and realize that’s likely to change. It’s a chill, cloudy afternoon—unseasonably cold. The sky presses down on the land like a heavy, gray sponge full of rain. Somewhere, there are calendars that say it’s autumn, but it feels like half-past winter, and the trees are turning rapidly, as if hurrying to catch up.

Along the road ahead I see a strip of maples with prematurely nude branches. It’s only when we get practically on top of them that I realize the leaves are merely transparent. They look like those blown glass things that once glittered in Manhattan shop windows. And as the moist breeze stirs them, I hear them, too—a fine shimmer of sound that’s almost music.

Fascinating. The rocking of the wagon no longer seems so soporific. I swing out over the chopped-down door and hit the ground running.

A sharp snarl snatches at me from behind. “Goldman! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Replying to Colleen’s question while galloping into the forest would waste breath, so I don’t bother. I make the trees and gingerly reach up to touch the crystalline leaves. They’re beautiful, but hard and cold, with sharp, biting edges. A breeze moves through the branches and stirs them to song. I imagine an entire melody is cradled in those branches, but then I imagine a lot of things.

I’m enchanted. I take off my cowboy hat and carefully dislodge several of the leaves into the crown. They fall with a sweet tinkle of sound.

“What is it?” Cal Griffin peers down at me from his horse, hazel eyes darting from me into the deeper woods. His hand is on the hilt of his sword.

I hold up one of the leaves. Steely sunlight sparks cold fire in the tracery of veins. “We may have to rename a couple of seasons,” I say. “How about spring, summer, shard, and bleak?”

Cal leans down from the horse and takes the leaf from my fingers. “Ouch. You’re not kidding. I’d hate to be standing under a tree when these things fall. If they fall.” He lays the leaf carefully on the palm of my hand. “Better get back in the wagon. Colleen might slow down or even stop for you if you apologize for scaring her like that.”

I carefully tuck the leaves into the pocket of my buckskin jacket and set the cowboy hat back in its rightful place. As always, my hair—too thick, too curly, and too long—puts up an admirable fight, but I cram the hat down until it submits peacefully.

“Scare Colleen,” I repeat. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

He smiles fleetingly and jerks a thumb toward the wagon, which has come to a stop down the road with Doc hovering near the tailgate. “Get.”

“Maybe it’s just a paradox,” I say, moving away from the trees. “Or an anomaly, or a mere flight of fancy.”

Cal clicks Sooner into a lope and leaves me to chug my way back to the wagon.

Colleen stays stopped to let me climb in. Then she gives me a chill glance, laces the reins through her fingers like she’s done it every day of her life, and clucks the team into motion. In this nippy weather they are rarin’ to go, as they say in the Wild West. They toss their heads, paw the ground, and pull at their bits. Colleen manages them effortlessly.

“You’re sure good at that horsey stuff,” I tell her, chipping at the brittle silence. “I guess it’s because you’re a native Corn-husker and all, huh?”

She gives me a cool green glance. “You think?”

I shrug. “Okay, I don’t know why you’re good at it. You just are. You’ve been around horses a lot, I’d guess.”

She repeats the glance, then puts her eyes back on the crusty tarmac ahead. One callused hand smoothes back her hair, which is almost as spiky as her annoyance. Scissors
still work, but Colleen is careless of such niceties. I think she does her hair with her pet machete.

“Yeah. I got a horse when I was thirteen. Before Dad died. You never forget the feeling of the reins in your hands, the ripple of muscle between your knees, the smooth glide of a horse at a full gallop. To this day, whenever I get stressed out or pissed off …” A pointed glance. “.. . I walk myself through bridling and saddling a horse just to chill. Well… and to prove to myself I remember how to do it.”

Her eyes go back to the road then, and she closes up tight as a clam. Conservation of intimacies, I guess. I play with my glass leaves, trying to shake music out of them.

After about five minutes of this Colleen speaks again. “You know what, Goldman? That’s damned annoying.”

I wrap the leaves in a handkerchief that’s made its way into my breast pocket and put them away. “You know what, Ms. Brooks? No one’s called me Goldman since my sophomore baseball coach. Well… and my probation officer.”

“Your what?”

Loose lips, the curse of an unquiet mind. “Oh, look,” I say. “A road sign.”

There is, indeed, a road sign. It proclaims that there is a town not far ahead. Grave Creek. Nice, ominous little name for a town.

“Eight miles,” says Cal, drawing his horse up close to the wagon. “If we hustle we might make it before the sun goes down.”

On a clear day we’d have some wiggle room, but the oppressive cloud cover puts us uncomfortably close to twilight. Since the Change, out after dark is not something you want to be. If the world is peculiar when the sun is up (and it is plenty peculiar), it is insanely scary when the sun goes down. Colleen nods and clucks her team into a brisk trot.

Barely half an hour later we hear a shout from Cal, who’s taken the vanguard. He lopes back to us through the gloamin’, waving an arm. Doc draws up along our right flank to see what all the hoo-ha is about. Pulling up, Cal points southwest.